Seems everything is a Lite On or a rebadged Lite On. What if I don't like Lite On's? Is there a list some where that tells which products are rebadged Lite Ons?

I am looking for a CD-RW player, a CD Player, and a DVD Player. I am trying to build a quiet machine, so I would like quiet drives. I was thinking about the Toshiba 1712 DVD Drive and possibly the Asus 520 CD drive. Are these good choices, and are these not Lite Ons? What is a great CD-RW?

Toshiba and Asus are not LiteOn. Neither are Samsung, Pioneer, LG, Yamaha, Plextor, BTC, Benq, Artec, AOpen, Teac and many more. Even manufacturers that have in the past rebadged LiteOn drives, such as Cendyne, Verbatim, Digital Research, etc., don't exclusively resell LiteOn drives. It is definitely not the case that everything is a LiteOn or rebadged LiteOn.

Ian does have reviews of both Toshiba and Asus drives. Although they may not be for the specific models you are looking at, reading through them all should give you a feel for the general quality of those brands:

From what I know, all burners can do EFM encoding, it's what they need to do to write a disk... And hoxlund, you're way off the mark with this comparison between Lite-On and Plextor... The price difference is there with a reason and doesn't even fully reflect the difference in quality of manufacture and reliability between the two drives.

HazMat wrote:From what I know, all burners can do EFM encoding, it's what they need to do to write a disk... And hoxlund, you're way off the mark with this comparison between Lite-On and Plextor... The price difference is there with a reason and doesn't even fully reflect the difference in quality of manufacture and reliability between the two drives.

Oh! That is a harsh statement made by you. Though I'm a Liteon's fan but others also have their own opinion. You can't said Liteon is only the best drive in the market. Thing that is working great for us (at least we like Liteon very much) do not mean it is good for others also. Different people has different needs. Anyway I'm not meant to offend . Just my very owned opinion.

HazMat wrote:From what I know, all burners can do EFM encoding, it's what they need to do to write a disk... And hoxlund, you're way off the mark with this comparison between Lite-On and Plextor... The price difference is there with a reason and doesn't even fully reflect the difference in quality of manufacture and reliability between the two drives.

WTH? Get your facts straight please.

He is right when he says that all drives do EFM coding whilst writing discs. The difference is that the Mediatek chipset is the only one that makes the right short-cuts to defeat Safedisk 2. AIUI even Mediatek isn't absolutely perfect; compromises must be made.

As for the reliability difference between LiteOn and Plextor ... it's there alright. But are LiteOn drives good enough for 99% of applications? Of course they are.

That might not help, BuddhaTB. I already gave him essentially the same list (yours is a bit more complete ), but Empty7 still questioned whether or not LG is made by LiteOn. Maybe hearing it from more than one source will convince him.

Empty7, LiteOn is a Taiwainese company. LG and Samsung are Korean companies. So if you go with one of these two you won't even be getting a drive from the same country as LiteOn. Does that keep you far enough from LiteOn? I actually do think LG and Samsung should be two good contenders for you if you don't want a LiteOn.